Janine Laitus (37:12)
It was July 22nd of 2002, and I was driving down Interstate 70 in Missouri, which runs straight as a ruler all the way from Denver to way past St. Louis. And where I was trying to go was St. Louis, because more than anything, I needed to get to the airport. And I was buzzing past billboards and I was buzzing past cars, and in the cars there were these families, and in the families there was everybody there was there Were moms and dads and kids, and nobody was dead. I was ripping down the highway. I was going 85. I was going 90. I was going 95. And I just. I wanted a cop to pull me over so that I could get out and scream at the cop and somehow get this out of me. Because my mom called that morning. But the story doesn't start there. Two weeks earlier, I had been in a hotel room with a colleague, and we were just talking, and my cell phone rang, and it was my big sister. And she said, janine, have you heard from Amy? And right then I knew, and I started shaking my head, and I realized that I hadn't talked to Amy and that normally I talk to Amy all the time. Three times a week, four times a week, I'd call her and I'd go, you know the movie that was like a class reunion after the guy committed suicide? And there was a guy in that who sold tennis shoes. Who was that played by. And she goes, oh, that was Kevin Klein. I mean, she knew everything. When people at work were driving her crazy or when my kids were driving me crazy, she was the one I picked the phone up for. And I realized that it had been days since I had talked to my baby sister. And into the phone, I said, he killed her. And my friend starts shaking his head, and my sister's really quiet. And then she said, I know, but we can't think that yet. And I understood why we couldn't think that yet, because if we thought it, maybe it would be true. The reason we thought it, and it gives me goosebumps even to talk about it now, is that nine months earlier, my sister, who had been 37 years old going back to grad school, had just lost 85 pounds, had bought her own condo for the first time, had met this guy online, and she fell in love. And he was her cowboy. And in the pictures, he's wearing a cowboy hat and a big rodeo belt buckle, and he's got this big gold cross on a chain around his neck. She would tell me stories. He leaves me love notes, she said, and he makes my meals for me, and he uses my Weight Watcher rules. But he wasn't working. And so she was supporting both of them, and he was living in her home. But all this, you know, I knew this. I'd heard dribs and drabs and pieces of this, but at the time, I was really wrapped up with getting out of my own marriage. I had left my husband two months prior. And it was a marriage where, if I looked at another man. I'd be up all night with that finger jabbing me in the chest, insisting that I wanted this other man, that I was flirting with this other man. I would go to the grocery store and Little league practice and pretty much nowhere else. But I didn't tell Amy that. So now Amy's missing and we start making these phone calls and we call her friends. She's got a friend who's a Buddhist monk. And we call the monastery, we call everywhere. And then we start hoping that maybe she's just been in a horrible car accident, you know, and she just has amnesia or she's in a coma somewhere. And when you are hoping that, that's horrible. And then they found her. Co workers found a note in her desk drawer. And that note said, if I am missing or dead, pick up Ron Ball. And Ron Ball was her live in boyfriend. One of the sad things about that envelope is that it was dated 10 weeks earlier. So for 10 weeks she had been afraid. And for 10 weeks we talked about movies and the weather. And eight weeks before, I had left my husband and I am sure I monopolized our conversations. And that feeling of it's just like being the survivor of someone who succeeds at suicide. What did I miss? What didn't I ask? Was I too selfish? You know, why didn't she tell me? And you know, in my case, I kept thinking it's because I kept talking. And I also kept making my facade shiny, which didn't allow her to tell the truth. And so, you know, I didn't tell the truth. So she couldn't tell the truth. And then they found her car. And in her car were beer cans. But the fingerprints on the beer cans were all the boyfriends because my sister didn't drink beer. She said that she preferred to get her calories through chocolate. And there were newspapers with a recent date on them. But my sister didn't read the paper. So helicopters went up, search dogs went out. The big Cyclops TV cameras followed us everywhere we went. They were parked outside our hotels. We had two rooms. And the news was on in this room on one channel and that room on the other channel. And we would run back and forth trying to see if there's anything. My sister's employer let out a bunch of employees and they pasted flyers up all down the main street of the town, strobing in the side of your vision. It was, have you seen Amy? Have you seen Amy? Have you seen Amy? And I remember one day when my mom had to push open the door at the deli and push her own daughter's face taped to the glass, away so that she could just go in and order a sandwich. My mom and dad and the rest of us would get smuggled into the back of the sheriff's offices so that the media couldn't question us, so that they couldn't come to my mom and ask her questions. I remember us having this huge press conference and there were these collages of photos of Amy. And my mom looked into all those cameras, all of us standing beside her, and said, please help me find my baby. Eventually, though, we had to go home. I had a three year old at home. I had a house, I had a job. And we all went home. But those detectives are saints. They stuck on this case ridiculously long. They just kept going after this guy and kept going after him. He escaped to his family home in Tuscaloosa, which is out of district. And the detectives took time off work and away from their families so that they could just stake out the place. But the day I'm talking about, the day I'm telling you my story about, was July 22nd. And mom called and she said they found Amy. And I knew that they hadn't found my baby sister. They hadn't found the one with the stupid jokes and the huge laugh and the one who brought so many beads back from Mardi Gras that when we put them all on my daughter, you couldn't even see her face anymore. All they had found was her body wrapped in a painter's tarp and tied with speakers wire and buried at a construction site. On the 4th of July, 2002. I called my baby sister and I said, hey, what are you doing? And we talked about nothing. And she told me that she was baking bread for her sweetheart and he was going to be home later. And I asked her if they were going to to go to the fireworks. And she said, no, we'll make our own fireworks. And when we got off the phone, I said to her, I love you, Amy. And that's the last time I ever spoke to her. My baby's sister was strangled during the fireworks on the 4th of when Jane called and said Amy was missing, there was this gut feeling because suddenly it was like tumblers falling into place. The things Amy had told me, like, he has priors, but don't worry, they're just money things. He's never hurt anybody. When the sisters all got together and shared stories, it turns out that Amy had bought him a pickup truck after he had crashed his Own because he was driving drunk. She had bought him a utility trailer, sprayers, ladders, everything it would take to put him into business as a house painter. And when she died, she was a secretary. And when she died, she had $60,000 in debt for things for him. But she was vulnerable, because in our culture, if you're obese, you don't think you have as many options as far as partners go. And only after she had lost this incredible amount of weight did she even think she deserved anybody. And this guy was very, very, you know, this idea, let's set the alarm for a half an hour early so that we can lie in bed and cuddle before work. And the love notes. And she had bought him a big screen TV and then put speakers in the back for surround sound. But being my sister, she hadn't installed the cables, the speaker wire, so it was just lying across the baseboard. And that's what he used to tie her up in the painter's tarp. So I drove to the airport, screaming, Past FedEx trucks, past semis. I pick up my phone, I call my friend and I say, I am going to identify and claim my sister's body. And they take the call. And I'm crying and I call and I call and I call. I am going to identify and claim my sister's body. Finally, I called my friend Russ. And Russ said, say goodbye, Amy. And I said, no. He said, say goodbye, Amy. You're gonna have to say it. And you can say it with a friend or you can say it alone. So say goodbye, Amy. And I said, fuck you. And he said, no, you've gotta say it. And I drove for a while longer. And finally I just whispered it. I just whispered it. I just said, goodbye, Amy. And he said, say it again. Goodbye, Amy. And then I was just bawling and I could barely see. But I kept driving anyway. Years later, I wrote this book. And one of the people who contacted me was his daughter from his prior marriage. And she wrote, my daddy is a good man. He used to carry me on his shoulders. Yes, he has a drinking problem, but he never hurt my mom or me. He just left when I was little. About two days later, I got another email, and it was from the this girl's mother, Ron Ball's first wife. And she said, my daughter doesn't remember. But I picked her up and ran when she was a little girl. And if I had pressed charges, maybe your sister would be alive. All I could say to her was that, no, the way sentencing worked, he would have been out and no, she cannot carry that guilt. But man, I wish we had all told you our stories.
